When veteran DC cop Det Baylor drove his maroon hummer through a snowball fight, it was pelted with snowballs. (More details here.)

Unfortunately, he overreacted and started waving his gun around — and now he’s famous on teh interwebs. Ho ho ho!

(Image stolen from icanhazcheeseburger)

…goes to the well.

One  day the bottom will drop out.

Especially if the well is full of cement.

By which I mean not literally in this overspill parking lot, but here I am in the Northern hemisphere, mid December, and it’s blue skies, sunny and warm (low 20s), and that’s the Pacific Ocean right there.  Oh yeah.

Pretty fuckin’ nice, eh!

(Of course, that was yesterday. Today it’s back to the usual: raining again, woken up by one of the cats licking my head and stepping in my eye, oppressed by the sudden unwonted arrival of a flurry of work, etc etc.  It’s all good though.)

Pre-emptive arrest? Apparently it’s ‘controversial’. Well, that’s reassuring. But wait, did you fucking hear yourself?? Pre-emptive arrest??

I mean, I don’t happen to agree with these people in this particular case, but that’s neither here nor there. PRE-EMPTIVE fucking ARREST?

These people haven’t actually done anything wrong. But it’s OK to arrest them because maybe they would have. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out the implications of this.

So these are the new rules then? Pre-emptive is OK? We’re living in Minority Report from now on. OK, well, thanks, I’ll remember that.

(Also, I can’t help noticing that although these protesters are clamoring for bigger better harder faster stronger laws/policies/treaties/regulations, the Telegraph report nevertheless labels them as ‘anarchists’. What’s wrong with this picture?)

I just found some new software on my computer.

It’s called Browser Highlighter.  It’s some kind of Firefox extension, although fuck knows what it does.  It just installed itself during a Skype ‘update’ without asking me, and without even telling me.

What the fuck, Skype?  Are you fucking serious?  You’re just going to go around putting software on my machine without even telling me, never mind checking with me to see if it’s OK?  What the fuck kind of operation are you running?  You think this is a good business model?  If so, I guess it would be OK with you then if I came round to your house, let myself in and started spraypainting the walls.

And you’ve been doing this for fucking months, you dicktards.

Skype’s new business model. (Image lifted from Ghosts of Shopping Past)

And since Ebay are apparently behind this invasive, offensive clusterfuck, they can fuck off as well.

(Technical note:  simplest way to remove this fucker seems to be via control panel/ add or remove programs.)

(And while I was writing this, I completely forgot about my cup of tea — and now it’s stone cold. All thanks to you, Skype, you utter, utter bastards. Seriously though, you had a great product, a real killer app. Why the fuck are you so hell bent on turning it to shit?)

…I guess it’s really a question of who was there first.

Try as I might, I can’t actually think of a better solution.

Lord Stern, the economist who produced the Stern Report for the UK government, has apparently commented on the Climategate affair. According to this rather mangled Telegraph report, he allegedly said of the so-called ’skeptics’:

“If they are muddled and confused, they do not have the right to be described as anything other than muddled and confused.”

Fair enough then. Ad hominem it is from now on.

Please step forward Dr Timothy D Mitchell.

Dr Mitchell, of the UEA’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has co-authored various climate-related academic papers, including, for example, this 2005 publication with Phil Jones.  He’s also mentioned in the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file.

And yet, unusually for a scientist, Dr Mitchell is (was?) not only a member of the South Park Evangelical Church, but this transcript further suggests that he is (was?) also a ‘Young Earth Creationist’. Which is to say that he apparently believes that the earth isn’t millions of years old, but that it was in fact made by God less than 6000 years ago.

The wording in the Darnell-Mitchell transcript — I have no evidence that it’s genuine; nor have I any reason to doubt its authenticity, so take it for what it is: ie a page 2 Google search result on the string ‘Dr Tim Mitchell uea’ — is very cautious. Dr Mitchell is careful to present the YE Creationist argument as a hypothetical case. However, at the end, where he is ’speaking for [him]self’, he says that the Greenland ice sheet ‘was deposited immediately post-Flood.’

You read that right. He’s talking about the Biblical flood. The one with Noah, the Ark, all the animals two by two.

Because, obviously, everyone knows that the flood isn’t just some fairy story. No! It really happened.

And it happened less than 6000 years ago.

Before the Greenland ice sheet formed.

So here’s a ’scientist’, with access to more climate data than most of us are allowed to have, who, on the basis of the evidence and his own good judgment, concludes that the Greenland ice sheet was deposited after the Biblical flood depicted in Genesis chapters 6-9.

Fucking wow.

So tell me, Lord Stern, exactly who the fuck is ‘muddled and confused’ now?

Hmm, yes. That’s a good question.

ETA: Tim Mitchell no longer works as a scientist. More of his bio here (third post down).

Danish Law says that you’re ‘entitled’ to make backup copies of  copyright material, but also that you’re ‘not permitted’ to break DRM.

12.–(1) Anyone is entitled to make or have made, for private purposes, single copies of works which have been made public if this is not done for commercial purposes. Such copies must not be used for any other purpose.

§ 75 c. It is not permitted without the consent of the rightholder to make circumvention of effective technological measures

‘Entitled’ versus ‘not permitted’. So which is it?

Henrik Anderson, a braver man than me, decided to find out for himself. After copying more than 100 DRM-protected DVDs, he tried to get Denmark’s Antipiratgruppen to prosecute him. They  apparently wimped out, so he turned himself in to the cops, for, as he says, ‘the case must be decided.’

Or as Cory Doctorow put it, he needed ‘to find out which law mattered.’

Quite.

Good luck to you, Henrik. I hope you blow those cocksuckers out of the water.

(This really is a crap logo. I suppose it must be a square peg in a round hole, but it looks like a musical cube breakdancing in an ashtray. Don’t they have graphic designers in Scandinavia?)

Continuing with the motoring theme –

Just look at the dreadful scuff marks on this guy’s Bumper Protector.

Clearly, he’s in the market for a Bumper Protector Protector.

I’m all over it, babe. Fire up those production lines! This could be even bigger than the anatomically correct, inflatable, washable, self-lubricating cabbage patch dolls.

Clip art mostly from Mark du Toit’s marktoon website.